Let’s talk about horses. With news of Europe’s horse meat scandal grabbing headlines last month, it’s hard not to have equine on the mind. In 1875 Scientific American published an article, “Shall We Eat the Horse?” hypothesizing the economic benefits of consuming horse meat in the U.S. At the time hippophagy was practiced in Europe, [...]

The last time I browsed the cookbook section of a bookstore, the options were dizzying. The present day culinary record of our habits and inclinations is diverse. It reflects the need to both speed up and slow down, have quick meals and lingering dinner parties, and preserve the tried and true and dabble with the [...]

S has taken the lead in preparing our weeknight meals. It helps us get dinner on the table earlier but he’s also interested in helping us eat more healthfully. He’s invested a great deal of time into learning about healthy food options and healthy substitutes for the richer foods he enjoys. Our daily menu has [...]

Ed Note: My SciAm colleagues Bora Zivkovic and Jason Goldman recently re-posted their excellent discussions on our mad affair with peppers. As Jason rightly notes, pepper—in the form of pepper spray—has been in the news much of late and people are horrified at its potential to hurt. Yet, it’s a food item that many people [...]

Here in the US, many of us are in the midst of Thanksgiving preparations: turkeys are being baked (or perhaps fried) and basted, potatoes are being mashed, and pies are setting. And people are gathering—which is perhaps the most important part of this particular holiday. During this holiday, discussions abound on the nature of tryptophan, [...]

During a very packed trip through New England last week, I managed to squeeze in a late tour to the Sam Adams Brewery where I learned that if a bartender attempts to serve my Sam in anything other than a sanctioned Sam Adams glass, I should consider sending it back. I’ll admit that for the [...]

Ed. Note: It’s “Food Day” on the SciAm guest blog, and bloggers around the network have also been sharing their thoughts on our relationship with modern foods. A year ago, AiP ran a series on coffee. It took on a life of its own, and spurred several follow-up discussions, which you can read here. In [...]

Ed Note: A version of this article appeared on Anthropology in Practice on Jan. 26th, 2010. How much do we really know about the food we eat? How do items like fruits and vegetables get to the supermarket? What goes into packaging and processing them so they’re safe to eat? Are local foods better? Street [...]

Ed. Note: This article originally appeared on Anthropology in Practice on May 2, 2011.   Lunch is an often neglected meal of the day: sometimes skipped, many times hastily consumed, lunch is often over before it begins. It feels like an intrusion: we have to stop what we’re doing, pause our stream of thought or [...]

There’s a sign hanging in my local deli that offers customers some tips on what to expect in terms of quality and service. It reads: Your order: Can be fast and good, but it won’t be cheap. Can be fast and cheap, but it won’t be good. Can be good and cheap, but it won’t [...]

This post was inspired by the session at the upcoming ScienceOnline 2013 entitled Chemophobia & Chemistry in The Modern World, to be moderated by Dr. Rubidium and Carmen Drahl For some reason, a lot of people seem to have an unreasonable fear of chemistry. I’m not just talking about fear of chemistry instruction, but full-on [...]

This is the last part of my interview with Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic, author of Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate, conducted earlier this month over lunch at Evvia in Palo Alto. (Here is part 1 of the interview. Here is part 2 of the interview.) [...]

We continue my interview with Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic, author of Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate, conducted earlier this month over lunch at Evvia in Palo Alto. (Here is part 1 of the interview.) In this segment of the interview, we ponder the kind of [...]

This summer, I reviewed Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate by Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic. This month, with the approach of the holiday season (prime time for picky eaters to sit with non-picky eaters at meal time), Stephanie and I sat down for lunch at Evvia [...]

Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food by Jeff Potter O’Reilly Media, 2010 We have entered the time of year during which finding The Perfect Gift for family members and friends can become something of an obsession. Therefore, in coming days, I’ll be sharing some recommendations. If you have family members and [...]

Via a tweet from Ed Yong, I discovered this weekend (not that I couldn’t have guessed) that purveyors of science kits for kids are still gendering the heck out of them. That is to say, there are science kits, and there are science kits for girls. For all I know, putting science kits in pink [...]

For years, you’ve heard the tremendous fatigue experienced after an American Thanksgiving dinner laid at the feet of the turkey — or more precisely, blamed upon the tryptophan in that turkey. Trytophan, apparently, is the go-to amino acid for those who want to get sleepy. Let me note, before we go on, that for all [...]

When the demand of my job and my family life allow, I try to take advantage of the fact that I live in California by maintaining a vegetable garden. One of the less pleasant aspects of vegetable gardening is that, every winter and spring, it requires me to embark on a program of snail and [...]

When we think about food, how often do we think about what it’s going to do for us (in terms of nutrition, taste, satiety), and how often do we focus on what was required to get it to our tables? Back when I was a wee chemistry student learning how to solve problems in thermodynamics, [...]

You may have noticed by now that the Scientific American Blog Network is having something of a Chemistry Day. Reading about chemistry is fun, but I reckon it’s even more fun to do some chemistry. So, if you find yourself with a few moments and the need to fill them with chemical fun, here are [...]

There are 25 scientists on the Knorr, and 24 crew members. (And then me — the weird one with the camera). That’s 50 people altogether…which makes operating the Knorr quite a logistical feat. And that includes feeding us. How is your food? What are they feeding you? Is it like space food or more like [...]

Editor’s Note: William Gilly, a professor of cell and developmental biology and marine and organismal biology at Stanford University, is traveling with a group of students on board the Don José in the Sea of Cortez. They will monitor and track Humboldt squid and sperm whales in their watery habitats. This is the group’s eighth [...]

As their traditional food supply disappears because of climate change and invasive species, Yellowstone National Park’s grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis ) are increasingly seeking sustenance outside their protected home—a move which more than ever puts them in the crosshairs. An estimated 75 Yellowstone grizzlies where killed or "removed from the wild," as the U.S. [...]

Remember 1999? It was the year in which the European Union first unveiled its uniform currency and Y2K threatened to bring the technological rapture to global information systems. 1999, the year the artist then-known as Prince declared the benchmark for partying (although he sang it in 1982). It also marked the identification of a new [...]

When Omega Eggs (eggs containing Omega fatty acids) first appeared on the mass market in the early 2000s I had this bizarre image in my head of a semi-crazed scientist extracting the yolk with a giant syringe, swirling it about in a beaker with a neon blue solution to extract the bad fat, injecting it [...]

Celiac disease is an autoimmune disease in which the ingestion of gluten induces enteropathy, or inflammation of the gut, in genetically susceptible individuals. This destruction of the gut means that nutrients cannot be absorbed, leading to a variety of clinical symptoms: anemia due to the lack of iron, atherosclerosis due to the lack of calcium, [...]

Sitting at the end of the long wooden bar, I watch with curiosity as Richie begins his pour. He starts the stopwatch on his cell phone and proceeds to pour steaming hot water over the coffee grounds in a precise choreographed motion. The water hits the grounds and starts to seep through while small bubbles [...]

Sophia Kathariou is the kind of scientist who can turn food-borne bacteria into great dinner conversation. The associate professor of food science and microbiology at N.C. State University in Raleigh, N.C., spoke about her work Thursday night at Mitch’s Tavern, a longtime haunt for professors and students alike. The talk was one of Sigma Xi’s [...]

Euell Gibbons’ Stalking the Wild Asparagus is illustrated only with ink sketches of the plants, so it is hardly a field guide for a modern aspiring forager; and since he suggests adding butter and/or bacon to almost every vegetable he finds, it is not really suitable as a contemporary cookbook either. But it does have [...]

Watching videos of fish feeding frenzies is a very emotional experience for me. You know the videos I’m talking about (personal favorites here, 0:55 in, and here). They feature a swirling, glittering mass of fish that seems to dance and flit as a single entity while being torn apart by three or four types of [...]

Think that your eyes are bigger than your stomach? Well, actually, yes… they are.

Welcome to the huge and wonderful day here at the Scientific American blog network, where we are having great fun discussing food and trends in modern agriculture and why people are so passionate about these topics. Here is a compilation of all of today’s posts covering these topics, as well as a choice collection of [...]

There are nano-sized particles in your food. Does this make you nervous? A new report from an environmental health group, As You Sow, raises concern about nanoparticles in some popular sweets. The group says it found particles of titanium dioxide less than 10 nanometers in size in the powdered sugar coating on donuts from Dunkin’ [...]

As New York, New Jersey and other states hit hard during Superstorm Sandy last fall begin their long road to recovery, the decisions they make on how to rebuild are crucial to determining how well they’re weather than next big storm. The choices range from installing large storm-surge sea barriers near Staten Island and at [...]

Grocery store aisles are awash in foods and beverages that contain high-fructose corn syrup. It is common in sodas and crops up in everything from ketchup to snack bars. This cheap sweetener has been an increasingly popular additive in recent decades and has often been fingered as a driver of the obesity epidemic. These fears [...]

Looking for the perfect holiday entrée? Something nutritious yet easy on the Earth? Something with a subtle, yet distinctive, je-ne-sais-quoi flavor? Have you considered the humble mealworm? What about the super superworm? Before you click away in disgust, remember that the creeping, shelled, 10-legged crustacean we now so lovingly dip in butter (ahem, the lobster) [...]

Common wheat (Triticum aestivum) might seem as boring as the sliced bread it is baked into. But genetically, it is vexingly complex. Its genome is about six times as big as our own, and its genes are distributed among six sets of chromosomes (we humans have just two). In fact, the T. aestivum genome contains [...]

With a juicy insect dinner perched on a leaf above the water, what is a hungry little archer fish down below to do? Knock it down with a super-powered, super-precise jet of water that packs six times the power the fish could generate with its own muscles, according to new findings published online October 24 [...]

SAN ANTONIO, Texas—Eating might seem, principally, like a simple, primal act. We get hungry; we eat; we’re full. But surprising new research suggests that our habits, previous experiences, and our desire to conform to social norms helps determine not only how much we eat, but also how full we feel later on. The findings were [...]

SAN ANTONIO, Texas—Choosing what foods—and how much of them—to eat can be an annoying or even anguishing decision, with confusing labels and health stats vying for your attention. Or it can be too much of a no-brainer, with your hand reaching for whatever is closest without much of a second thought. With more than two [...]

The promise of a nice dinner might not always win over a woman, but for some male fish, a tasty-looking lure seems to get the girl pretty reliably. The trick is to make sure the offering resembles the local cuisine and then they can reel in the ladies hook, line and sinker. Swordtail charachin (Corynopoma [...]

A conference on feeding the world must also feed itself. Having attended more than my share of such conferences, I can say that the norm is keynotes that rally the troops in favor of organics while said troops munch on tortilla or potato chips. Or there is the earnest vegan route. (This is not a [...]

Down in the dark depths of the deep ocean live more than a dozen species of “Dumbo” octopuses. These octopods from the genus Grimpoteuthis are so named for their prominent, unusual earlike fins that they use to help them swim (reminiscent of the Disney elephant character who used his ears to fly). These graceful, gelatinous [...]

Almost as fast as you can say “go-go-gadget arm,” an octopus can stretch its arm more than twice its normal length—without the help of any cyborg attachments. What’s more, according to new research, female common octopuses (Octopus vulgaris) are able to stretch their arms even more than the males—on average, three times resting length. This [...]

The many octopus species that live beyond the reach of vacationing snorkelers, scuba diving researchers and even near-shore commercial fisheries are relative unknowns compared with the more familiar shallow-water species. But that doesn’t mean that they are not of great importance to science—and the ocean’s intricate food web. Last time we met the super-fecund cephalopod [...]

Florida stone crabs (Menippe mercenaria) are known to diners for their sweet, meaty claws. And octopuses also seem to relish these delicacies. Reports are coming out of Florida that the stone crab fishery is way down this year—and many think local common octopuses (Octopus vulgaris) are to blame. The crabs are caught in traps, most [...]

I’m fascinated by the biology of soil and the history of “dirtiness”–where dirt and bacteria are allowed to be and where we must clean them away. Mary Douglas defines dirt in her classic book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo as “matter out of place”: [Dirt] is a relative idea. [...]

You may have seen the recent news of a sensor-filled smartfork that vibrates to warn you if you’re eating too quickly. I’m going to reserve judgement on the merits of the smartfork, invented by the French company Slow Control and marketed by HAPILABS, but I think it’s interesting to look at this cutlery innovation in [...]

There’s a mounting pile of evidence that three particular neonicotinoid insecticides, clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam, are harming bees. During the late 1990’s this class of pesticides began being used to treat corn and other field crop seeds. Today, they are the most commonly used pesticides in the U.S., and have covered millions of acres. Despite their [...]

In 2010, people across the globe munched their way through 128 million tons of seafood. That’s according to the latest data coming out of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). This hefty supply of fish equals around 41 pounds per person each year, and is taking its toll on the health of the oceans [...]

Rise ‘N Shine Farm’s first bounty of the year   Spring is here, and with it the first harvest of the season. It’s my family’s second year belonging to a CSA. This time around we chose a farm with a drop off site much closer to home. Our produce now comes from Rise ‘N Shine Organic Farm, [...]

Some people take Earth Day more literally than others. Howard Garrett is one of them. Better known as the Dirt Doctor, Garrett believes that the health of the planet begins with the earth beneath our feet; it starts with cultivating strong vibrant soil, and blossoms outwards from there. “Without healthy soil, we won’t have healthy [...]

I heard this story on NPR/PRI’s The World while driving home from yoga last night. Here’s the tl;dr of it: a Dutch company is perfecting ways to grow food indoors using LED lights and elaborate climate controls. By optimizing light levels and wavelengths, a range of crops can be grown. One could theoretically grow plants [...]

Here is some more food for thought about the modern global food economy. A study recently published by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization found that about one-third of all food produced on the planet is wasted, to the tune of 1.3 billion tons per year. Put another way, planet Earth throws away over 300 [...]

Good ol’ visual.ly. They always know how to ruin a perfectly good Thanksgiving binge! I wonder where mom’s pecan pie fits in… by visually.Browse more infographics.

There have been a whole slew of articles about the merits of eating bugs lately. The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The New Yorker have all run articles within the last month on various people in Europe and the US who are trying to reverse our deep aversion to entomophagy, the practice of eating [...]

From time to time, politicians and other rulers-of-men like to categorize the natural world not according to biology, but rather for convenience or monetary gain. Take, for example, the tomato. The progenitor of ketchup is a seed-bearing structure that grows from the flowering part of a plant. It is, by definition, a fruit. In 1893, [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about wildlife conservation psychology, especially in light of last month’s TEDxDeExtinction event. How do we convince human animals that other animals are worth protecting? Modern, ethical zoos have long made claims about the effectiveness of zoo visits and their in-house educational programs on learning outcomes and on conservation attitudes. [...]

When my brother and I were young, we were very careful to share the last bit of dessert equally. It’s not that we were particularly magnanimous. In their wisdom, my parents instituted a rule in our house: one of us would divide the snack in half, and the other would select his half. “You cut, [...]

The Giant Anteater, Myrmecophaga tridactyla, only eats ants and termites, as its name suggests. Since the giant anteater and its evolutionary ancestors have been feasting on ants and termites for nearly 60 million years, a researcher named Kent Redford hypothesized that, over time, ants and termites may have evolved various defenses to avoid predation. In [...]

Stories of pepper spray have been all over the news lately. On Fox News, Megyn Kelly wondered what all the fuss about this “food product” was, and while pepper spray is no vegetable, the compound that makes pepper spray into a weapon at 2-5.3 million Scoville units, is indeed the same compound that many humans [...]

My grandmother was born in Sobrance, in what was then called Czechoslovakia on November 5, 1930. She grew up in ten kilometers away, in a small town called Nagy-Muzsaly. Her father’s family were landowners, something that was very rare for Jewish families at the time, and they used that land to produce wine. My grandmother’s [...]